Everyone said I was born a cursed freak.

On the day I was supposed to become Luna, my fated mate Lucas stole my family's territory and publicly rejected me.

He threw me to the rogues on a Blood Moon night.

That was when Adrian, the ruthless Lycan King, found me.

Instead of tearing me apart, he claimed me as his Queen.

He publicly declared that anyone who dared to mock my marked face would pay with their lives.

Whenever Lucas's new mate tried to humiliate me, Adrian forced her to her knees.

Whenever Lucas begged for my forgiveness, Adrian crushed his pack's businesses.

I had never been treated so well before, and I fell completely for him.

I was spoiled rotten, carrying the King's royal twins.

Just before I was due to give birth, I went to surprise Adrian in the dungeon, but I accidentally overheard a conversation.

"Elena's royal blood is the only cure for my Silver Curse," Adrian's cold voice echoed in the dark cell.

"But she's heavily pregnant, Your Majesty!" his Beta whispered in panic. "Extracting it now will kill her and the twins!"

"Do you think I don't know that?" Adrian lowered his voice tightly.

"That's exactly why we staged this entire mating bond from the start!"

***

The wooden comb snagged in my hair, and Greta yanked hard enough to snap my head back.

"Hold still, you wolfless freak."

I gripped the vanity until the sting passed. In the mirror, the black crescent on the right side of my face looked darker than usual, as if the mark knew what day it was. It stretched from my cheekbone to my jaw, impossible to cover with powder or hair.

Mila dropped a silver pin beside the comb. "Twenty-two years old, no wolf, and still pretending Alpha Lucas is going to crown you Luna. You really never learn."

"Today is not about a crown." I kept my voice even. "It is about the southern woodlands."

The rolled treaty lay beside my hand. My father's seal was pressed into the wax at the bottom, beside Lucas Thorne's. Three years earlier, General Elias had died defending Blood Moon territory from a rogue incursion. Lucas had taken command of his soldiers, his treasury, and his border forts. In return, he had sworn that when I turned twenty-two, my father's lands would pass legally to me and our mating contract would be honored.

I had survived three years in Lucas's house for that promise.

Three years of meals arriving cold because servants "forgot" me. Three years of pack daughters whispering about my face. Three years of Lucas allowing Serena Croft to sit at his right hand while I was told to use the side entrance.

"The law is the law," I said.

Greta laughed. "Then take your precious law downstairs and see whether it protects you."

A ceremonial horn sounded through the manor.

Mila stepped away. "There. Your future is calling."

I took the treaty and left before either woman could see my hand shake.

No escort waited outside my room. No guard offered an arm. By the time I reached the central plaza, hundreds of pack members had already gathered beneath the Blood Moon banners. Their conversations thinned into whispers as I crossed the stones.

The stage at the far end had been built for two.

Lucas stood beneath the ceremonial arch in black Alpha robes, one hand on the hilt of his sword.

His other hand held Serena's.

She wore crimson silk and the moonstone circlet traditionally reserved for the Alpha's chosen Luna.

My stomach went cold.

I climbed the steps anyway.

Lucas watched me approach without expression.

I stopped three feet away and held out the treaty. "The three years are over. Sign the final land decree."

Serena's smile sharpened. "You brought that old thing?"

"It bears the former Alpha's witness mark, my father's seal, and Lucas's signature."

"Lucas," she said sweetly, "tell her."

He took the parchment from me.

For one foolish heartbeat, hope rose in my throat.

Then Lucas turned to the crowd.

"Three years ago, I made a promise to a dying commander," he announced. "I agreed to shelter his daughter until she came of age. I have fulfilled that obligation."

"That is not what the treaty says."

His eyes cut to mine.

I raised my voice so the people in the back could hear. "My father transferred command of his army and temporary stewardship of the southern woodlands to you. Stewardship, Lucas. Not ownership."

A murmur moved through the square.

Lucas's jaw tightened. "Your father is dead."

"His seal is not."

"And you think ink can force me to put a wolfless woman beside me?" He lifted the parchment. "You think I should risk the future of this pack on someone who cannot shift and carries a curse across her face?"

The crowd answered with ugly laughter.

I looked past him to Elder Croft, Serena's father, standing beside the council table. He lowered his eyes.

That told me everything.

"This was arranged before Serena returned," I said. "You already convinced the council to recognize the land as yours."

Lucas smiled for the first time.

"At last."

He tore the treaty down the middle.

The sound was small. Paper against paper. Yet it cut through me more cleanly than a blade.

"No."

I lunged for the pieces. Two guards crossed their spears against my chest and drove me backward.

Lucas tore the halves again, then again, until my father's last legal protection became scraps in his hands.

He threw them into my face.

A sharp edge nicked the black crescent on my cheek.

"The southern woodlands belong to Blood Moon," he said. "And Blood Moon belongs to me."

I stared at the scraps around my boots. "You stole his soldiers. You stole his gold. Now you are stealing the land he died protecting."

Lucas descended one step and bent close enough that no one else could hear.

"I needed your father's loyalists calm while I took control. Keeping you alive did that. They stopped asking questions. They retired. They bent the knee. You have not been useful to me in months."

The last of my hope died with remarkable quiet.

I straightened. "Then say it where they can hear you."

His eyes narrowed.

"Tell them you never intended to honor him."

For a moment I thought pride might stop him.

It did not.

Lucas turned back to the square. "Elena has no wolf, no recognized family authority, and no place in my court. Effective immediately, I strip her of Blood Moon protection and pack status."

Gasps replaced the laughter.

Even Serena shifted uneasily.

The rogue border was not exile in name only. Packless wolves vanished there. Travelers found bones caught in the marsh grass.

Lucas pointed toward me. "Take her cloak. Take the crest. Escort her beyond the southern marker."

A guard ripped the silver clasp from my shoulder. Another tore away the heavy winter cloak my father had given me before his final campaign.

The cold bit through my dress.

"You cannot send her out dressed like that," someone whispered.

Lucas heard.

"She wanted the southern woodlands," he said. "Let her walk through them."

I refused to give him tears.

At the border marker, the guards shoved me past the iron post and tossed my empty satchel at my feet. The gate slammed behind me.

No food. No weapon. No coat.

Only one torn corner of the treaty had caught inside my sleeve. My father's seal was still visible beneath the mud.

I closed my fist around it.

Behind the gate, Lucas called, "If the rogues are merciful, it will be quick."

I turned toward the dark trees.

"If I survive," I said without looking back, "I am coming for everything you stole."

Then a howl rose from the woods ahead of me.

A second answered from much closer.

And I walked into the rogue territory alone.

A howl split the woods behind me.

"I smell her," a rough voice called through the trees.

I pressed my back to a rotting pine and wrapped a strip torn from my dress around my bleeding forearm. Three pairs of green eyes moved between the trunks. They had found me less than an hour after sunset.

The largest rogue stepped into a shaft of moonlight. His fur was matted with mud, one ear torn nearly in half.

"Alpha Lucas sent us a fine gift."

My stomach tightened. "He sent you?"

The rogue grinned, showing yellow teeth. "He opened the border. That was invitation enough."

So Lucas had not simply banished me. He had made sure the wolves on this side knew I was coming.

I forced myself to stand straight. "Do you always live on another Alpha's scraps?"

A snarl rolled through the brush.

"Careful, human."

"Wolfless," another rogue called from my right. "I can smell it. No wolf. No pack. No one coming to save her."

They were right about the last part.

That did not mean I had to make the killing easy.

I had spent ten years gathering medicinal plants in the southern woods. Lucas thought that work beneath a future Luna, which was why he had never noticed how well I knew the ground. I knew where the limestone shelf broke beneath the moss. I knew which gullies flooded after winter storms. I knew the dead willow grove hid a sinkhole deep enough to swallow an elk.

I pushed away from the tree and ran.

Heavy paws struck the earth behind me.

"Flank her!"

Branches whipped my bare arms. My human lungs burned quickly without a wolf's strength to share the work, but panic would get me killed faster than exhaustion.

I listened instead.

One to the left. One to the right. The leader behind.

Exactly what I needed.

I veered toward the willow grove.

"She is slowing!" the right flanker shouted.

"I want a leg," the other laughed.

"You can fight over the bones when I am done," their leader said.

I reached the fallen cedar that marked the edge of the sinkhole and jumped. My boots landed on the narrow strip of exposed bedrock beyond it.

The two flankers followed without looking.

The moss collapsed under their weight.

Both wolves vanished to the chest in black mud.

One shifted halfway to human form, clawing at roots that ripped free in his hands. "Pull me out!"

The other sank to his ribs. "What is this?"

"Old peat bog," I said, backing across the stone. "The more you fight it, the faster you sink."

"Bitch!"

"That is not a rescue word."

I turned to run again.

A shadow dropped from the branches above me.

The leader's claws ripped across my back before I could duck. Pain exploded from my shoulder blades to my waist. The impact threw me forward onto slick stone.

He shifted into a broad, scarred man as he stalked after me.

"Clever little thing."

I kicked at his knee. He caught my ankle.

"Lucas should have kept you."

"He has terrible judgment."

I twisted, driving my other heel into his mouth. He swore and released me.

I scrambled backward.

The ground disappeared beneath my hand.

Cliff.

Mist boiled in the gorge below, thick enough to hide the bottom.

The rogue saw my hesitation and smiled.

"Forbidden valley. Even pack scouts stay away from it."

My mother's voice came back with brutal clarity.

Never step into the valley, Elena.

Never let your blood touch that ground.

I had been twelve when she whispered the warning from her deathbed. Her fingertips had been red when she traced the crescent across my cheek. I had thought fever made her afraid.

Now the rogue charged.

I had no choice.

I jumped sideways for a thorn vine hanging over the edge. My hand closed around it. Thorns cut into my palm as my body swung against the cliff face. My left shoulder wrenched with a sickening pop.

I screamed.

The rogue leaped after me and caught the same vine below my boots.

His weight tore fibers loose from the rock.

"We fall together," he growled.

"Not my plan."

I kicked his face. He bit at my ankle and missed.

The vine groaned.

Far below, something metallic scraped through the fog.

Clink.

Drag.

The rogue went still.

His pupils widened. "No."

"What?"

Clink.

Drag.

"Cut me loose," he whispered.

I stared down at him. "You were trying to eat me thirty seconds ago."

"You do not understand what lives down there."

The vine split another inch.

He clawed upward, suddenly desperate. "Pull me up!"

"You are heavier than I am."

"Then we are both dead."

The final fibers snapped.

We dropped through the mist.

The impact came in pieces: stone against my ribs, my skull striking frozen ground, the rogue's body hitting somewhere to my right with a wet crack.

For several seconds I could not breathe.

When air finally entered my lungs, it felt like glass.

The rogue lay twisted over a boulder. His neck bent wrong, but one hand still moved.

My own blood spread beneath me, bright against the frost.

Ancient grooves in the stone caught the red and carried it away in branching lines.

My mother's warning returned.

Never let your blood touch that soil.

"Stop," I whispered, dragging myself with my good arm.

The blood kept flowing.

The carved lines began to glow.

Pressure rolled through the gorge, so dense it forced my cheek to the ground. This was not a normal Alpha aura. It felt older, heavier, as if the mountain itself had decided to breathe.

Clink.

Drag.

The sound came closer.

The surviving rogue started to whimper.

"It woke up."

I lifted my head toward the fog.

Two red eyes opened inside it.

A deep voice rumbled through the stone.

"You smell like her."

I swallowed blood. "Stay back."

The chain scraped once more.

"You bled on my floor," the voice said. "You broke the seal."

A silhouette rose out of the mist, twice the height of any wolf I had ever seen, dragging an iron chain thick enough to anchor a fortress gate.

The rogue beside me was not dead.

He clawed at the frost with both hands, dragging his broken body away from the red eyes in the fog.

"Help me," he sobbed.

"Be quiet," I whispered.

"It is coming."

The chain scraped over stone.

The mist parted.

A wolf stepped into the moonlight, if something that size could still be called a wolf. Dark silver fur covered shoulders nearly level with my head even while he stood on four legs. A rusted iron cuff locked around one rear ankle. The chain behind it had carved trenches into the gorge floor.

His eyes were solid red.

No pupil. No recognition.

Only rage.

I had seen an illustration like him in one of my father's locked military journals. The Silver Rot, scholars called it. A disease of the old Lycan bloodline. It began with fever and violent shifts, then ate memory and judgment until the afflicted became stronger than ordinary wolves and less human by the day.

The last Lycan King had vanished years ago.

Apparently, he had not vanished far enough.

The rogue whimpered.

The beast's head snapped toward him.

"Do not move," I hissed.

Panic won.

The rogue screamed and tried to crawl.

The Lycan crossed the distance in a blur. His jaws closed around the rogue's torso. Bone cracked. One brutal shake silenced him.

I pressed my fist to my mouth.

The wolf dropped what remained of the body and turned toward me.

Blood darkened his muzzle.

I could not run. One shoulder hung uselessly. At least two ribs were broken. My back was slick with blood from the claws that had sent me over the cliff.

The Lycan lowered his head.

A growl shook grit from the rocks.

"I cannot run," I told him, because terror had apparently stripped me of good sense. "So if you are going to kill me, do it quickly."

He lunged.

I lifted my blood-covered right hand in front of my face.

The impact never came.

Hot breath hit my palm.

I opened one eye.

His muzzle hovered inches from me. My palm rested flat against his nose.

The wolf shuddered.

A sound escaped him that did not belong to a monster.

A wounded whine.

The red in his eyes flickered.

Black appeared around the edges, spreading inward until awareness returned in jagged pieces. His breathing turned ragged. The muscles under the silver fur trembled.

"What are you doing?" I whispered.

The beast folded.

Bones shifted with a series of brutal cracks. Fur receded. Claws became hands pressed into the frost.

A man knelt where the wolf had been.

He was enormous even in human form, scarred across one shoulder and down his ribs. The iron cuff remained on his ankle. His dark hair hung wet over his forehead, and his eyes, now black, fixed on my hand.

"You stopped it," he said.

His voice was rough from disuse.

"Stopped what?"

"The rot."

He looked at my face. His attention paused on the black crescent.

I waited for disgust.

None came.

"Who are you?" I asked.

"Adrian."

"Adrian what?"

A humorless smile touched his mouth. "You are bleeding to death and interrogating me."

"I prefer information before dying."

He reached for my injured shoulder.

I flinched back. "Do not."

"It is dislocated."

"I noticed."

His gaze sharpened. "If I leave it like that, you may lose use of the arm."

"And if you decide to become a wolf again?"

"Touch me."

I stared at him.

"You calmed the shift once. Do it again if you need to."

I almost laughed. "That is not reassuring."

He moved before I could argue, one hand bracing my upper arm, the other locking around the joint. "Bite down on something."

"On what?"

He tore a strip from the least bloody part of my dress and looped it into a crude sling before I could object. When I tried to shift away, he pointed at the blood soaking my back.

"You can hate me after you stop leaking onto my floor."

"Your floor?"

His gaze swept the gorge. "Everything inside the old seal is crown land. Technically, you trespassed."

"Then file a complaint."

Something almost human touched his expression. "I might, if you survive."

I screamed and struck him hard across the chest with my good hand.

He barely moved.

"You could have warned me."

"You would have refused."

"Correct."

"Then my method was efficient."

I hated him immediately.

I also could not deny that the joint sat where it belonged again.

A distant horn sounded high above the gorge.

Adrian's expression changed.

He stood and looked toward a narrow break in the cliff wall.

"My guard."

"Your guard?"

"They felt the seal break."

The pressure in the valley shifted with his mood. I understood then that the chain was not merely imprisonment. The entire gorge had been built to contain him.

"You are the missing King," I said.

His gaze came back to mine.

"Not missing. Contained."

"By whom?"

"People who preferred a mad King in chains to a sane one on a throne."

That answer carried more history than I could ask about while bleeding into the dirt.

Adrian crouched and slid one arm behind my back, the other beneath my knees.

"No."

"You cannot stand."

"That does not mean you get to carry me."

"You fell off a cliff. Pride can wait."

He lifted me.

My hand caught his bare shoulder on instinct.

The instant our skin met, heat tore through my body.

Not pain.

Recognition.

My pulse struck once, hard enough to make me gasp. His answered against my palm. The pressure in the gorge collapsed into a single line between us, bright and undeniable.

Adrian froze.

His black eyes widened.

"What was that?" I whispered.

His nostrils flared as he drew in my scent.

The red threatened the edges of his irises, but this time it was not madness. It was shock.

Above us, armored figures appeared through the fog.

"Your Majesty!" someone shouted.

Adrian did not look away from me.

"Say it," I demanded. "Whatever you just realized, say it."

His arm tightened around me.

"I know why your blood stopped my curse."

My heart kicked again.

"Why?"

The most feared Lycan on the continent stared at the wolfless outcast Lucas had thrown away.

"Because you are my mate."